The case of the curious power drain

I took my MacBook to the Nevada City 4th of July parade, to save some spots at Wisdom Cafe. This is your classic small-town event, with fire engines, jazzercisers and The German American Friendship Club in full lederhosen.

After about an hour of work, my battery life was down to less than an hour, instead of the 3-4 hours I was expecting. Hmm, maybe my battery is dying. But I can hear a faint humming noise, which means the hard disk is spinning continuously. And I had trouble putting my Mac to sleep before I left for the parade.

I fired up Activity Monitor, and saw that something called “ditto” was using up 95% of my CPU. Firing up the Terminal, I executed “ps auxwww | grep ditto” and got:

Executing “man ditto” in the Terminal tells me it’s used to “copy directory hierarchies, create and extract archives”. What’s odd is that it’s been running for 3942 minutes, or almost 3 days.

Then I remembered that a few days ago, I’d renamed a .jar file to .zip and tried to expand it, to show somebody the structure of a jar file. But the Archive Utility hung, or rather it refused to finish or quit. So I had to force-quit it.

Which apparently left the underlying “ditto” process running, and what looks like a fully expanded version of the .zip file in a hidden “.BAHO26HV” directory on my desktop. I restarted my Mac, deleted the directory, and everything returned to normal (less 3 hours of battery).